a hundred degrees

New Turbines

I replace the turbines on the roof today.

This morning I went to Home Depot with three things on my list: new turbines, a lawnmower blade, and liquid nails. I was frustrated in the attempt to get the lawnmower blade. I guess that the electric mowers have fallen out of fashion. I'm going to have to make a trip to the Black and Decker store to get a new one. Neither Home Depot nor Lowes carries the blade. Nor did I find NP-1 or Liquid Nails in their roofing departments. I ended up getting some other brand of patching stuff.

Replacing the turbines wasn't a huge job. There were only three real frustrations. One was that after taking the four screws out of the collar, it was still too tightly bound to the upright pipe to come off, so I had to take the four bolts out to disassemble the mechanism before I could get the old stuff off. Second was that the old one attached in four places and the new one in three, so I had to figure out how to punch holes in a pipe that was thin enough to give under pressure but thick enough to make a swift attack with an ice pick seem unlikely to succeed. I ended up putting my smallest bit in the oversized cordless drill. The second one went on quicker than the first since I had solved these problems already and the two extra trips down the ladder were not necessary. The problem, and final frustration, was that it did not turn as freely as the first. As I removed the baffle, which kept it from spinning while I was installing it, the turbine gave a little groan as it began to turn. I hoped it would get better, but it never did. Finally I removed it and exchanged it for a new one at Home Depot. This one spun better.

I think we still should get a ridge vent. One of the turbine is fed by a pipe that I think, due to sounds I've heard from there, is connected with our stove vent. The other is above a portion of our living room's vaulted cieling which puts it maybe three feet from the rafters. This one turbine and the two gable vents then are all we have to get the hot air out of our attic. We don't even have soffet vents to pull cooler air in.

On the plus side, in two months we will owe less than half the purchase price of the house. If we continue to make the extra principle payments that we've been making for the last 15 months or so then we will be sole owners by June 2009. Eleven years doesn't seem too bad to pay off our first home. Admittedly, we did start a little later on the whole marraige and family thing, which gave us time to get our finances a little straighter.